Biz & IT —

Comcast answers data cap questions

"We're out of the cap business," Comcast says.

In the wake of its decision to suspend its 250GB per month data caps while it considers two plans that would increase them to at least 300GB per month, Comcast execs took questions from journalists today about the move. Here, then, are Comcast's answers to the top questions, in bite-sized form. Unless indicated, all statements were made by Executive Vice President David L. Cohen.

How should journalists headline their stories today? "The headline today should be that there isn't a cap anymore. We're out of the cap business."

How has Comcast "killed" its caps? "Each of these pilot approaches will effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."

Isn't the marginal cost of bandwidth astronomically low? "Our network is not an infinite resource and it is expensive to expand it. As a result, appropriate pricing has to take into account total cost of building, maintaining, and operating the network, not just incremental operating costs."

Are more customers hitting the cap now? "We are not doing this because all of a sudden we have large numbers of customers who are approaching the 250GB cap... Only a very, very small percentage of our customers ever come anywhere near the 250GB cap"

Will Comcast raise prices? "We offer tiers of service starting at $9.95 a month and ranging up to higher price tiers. We're very comfortable with the pricing. We don't have any current intention to change our pricing."

Was the change made for technical reasons? "It's a matter of messaging way more than it is a matter of capacity. We just didn't like the message we were sending to our customers by telling them you have a static 250GB cap... There's no projection we had that said next year or the year after lots of customers would be hitting their byte cap. We're trying to send a signal to our customers… that we want you to use our service. We want you to feel free to go on the Internet and do anything lawful you can find on the Internet. We want you to feel free to use YouTube and Netflix and Hulu."

Will Skype count against thesholds? "Skype does travel over the public Internet, therefore it will count against data usage thresholds. We do not anticipate that the addition of a Skype product is going to push large numbers of our customers, or any of our customers really, to go over data usage thresholds."

Did the Xbox controversy matter? "There's been a little bit of noise recently with the launch of our Xfinity application on Xbox, but this has been part of an ongoing discussion at this company for several years and intensive analysis over the past six months."

If every site is treated equally, why does Xfinity get special treatment on Xbox? "This is really not the call to debate this, but the 15-second elevator speech is that the Xfinity TV app on the Xbox does not travel over the public Internet." Cohen noted that only the Xfinity TV app on Xbox is exempt from data use threshold. Xfinitytv.com on a computer does count against the cap, just as Netflix does.

The bottom line, for Comcast: "At a minimum," said Cathy Avgiris, general manager for Communications and Data Services, "every customer will get a 20 percent increase in their usage allowance which I think is good news for every customer."

Promoted Comments

I simply read it as now you will be able to download as much data as you want, at full speed, but you'll have to pay extra above a certain amount (300 GB). That's surely better than a hard cap with disconnection or slowdown. Sure, I'd love to pay one price for unlimited (infinity GB) downloads, but that is a dying model. I can live with this new model if the first threshold level is high enough. 300 GB is high enough as a first trigger point.